War and Peace in a Digital World: a millennial perspective
This piece was originally published on February 4, 2020 on LinkedIn.
As I reflect on the many sessions and discussions supported by Kite Insights this year at Davos, one session stands out: a breakfast hosted by the ICRC (Red Cross) on millennials’ views on human rights, warfare and international law. What do young people think will characterise wars of the future? What moral rules should govern conflict? How are ‘deepfakes’ changing how aggressors launch offensives, moving from direct intervention to arms-length disruption? How are digital ecosystems enabling people to connect across national boundaries, building empathy? How is trauma impacting the mental health of not just this generation, but future generations? How can we help this generation frame a future that prioritises negotiation over conflict; that places universal human rights at its core and that harnesses the power of digital connectedness while managing its risks?
Drawing from the ICRC’s newly-launched report, a survey of 16,000 young people in 16 countries, half in conflict zones, half in peace, War or Peace: Millennials Decide brought together perspectives from digital anthropology, neuroscience, social sciences, social activism and international diplomacy.
Digital connectivity, argued Rahaf Harfoush, who teaches at SciencePo and is executive director of the Red Thread Institute of Digital Culture, is both enabling millions of people to share values, information, live video and ideas across borders but also sequestering people in AI-powered bubbles that quarantine them from influences that may not align with their own. This narrows, rather than broadens, access to ideas. We can see social media both connecting people, enabling them to get positively involved through instant mobile donations to causes, for example, and also dividing them. The emergence of social tribes that cross national and political identities also powers holacratic, crowd-sourced activism. Recent Hong Kong protestors’ five demands were crowd-sourced, for example. The Occupy movement, added Micah White, co-creator of the project, grew from Wall Street to over 1,000 cities through digital sharing. Soldiers in opposing armies converse on platforms such as Tic Toc, sharing common humanity and experiences.
But the always-on, massive scale of social media can also inure a generation to violence and lead to what Harfoush calls ‘slacktivism’ as much as it can mobilise people to action. This may be why 36% of millennials polled would condone torture in some circumstances; think it acceptable that captured enemy combatants should be denied access to their families; they seem to condone ways of talking that fall well short of acceptable usage; and while they overwhelmingly oppose weapons of mass destruction, they think they are effective. An apparent lack of concern for humanitarian law provides international institutions and governments with a challenge, argued Peter Maurer, President of the ICRC: if the millennial generation condones what are outrages and crimes, we need to get better at communicating why they matter.
While governments can now mobilise social networks to engender civil unrest and disruption without direct intervention, using disinformation enabled by ‘deepfakes’, the fact is that real wars are still very much alive, killing real people, crushing real buildings and disrupting real lives, argued Peter Maurer, President of the ICRC. And the 20 worst conflicts raging in the world today are creating a generation traumatised by violence with impacts not just for their mental health, but generations to come. Syrian children who were 10 at the start of the conflict are now 19 and have known no peace. Colombia has endured the longest internal conflict in the western hemisphere, pointed out Jorge Alejandro, co-founder of BIVE, a public health initiative. Wars are not always fought between rival nations but sectarian groups within them. Ilina Singh, Professor of Neuroscience and Society at the University of Oxford, emphasised that it is now proven that trauma is passed biologically to future generations. Mental health initiatives are the fastest-growing area of the ICRC’s work, said Maurer: the Red Cross is no longer just about surgery to fix physical damage but it’s about mental health.
It is perhaps no surprise that mental health and climate change are two causes championed by the millennial generation; both areas that are examples of colossal government failure, argued Ilina Singh. “Young people will change the face of mental health,” she said. But the poll shows that both of these are less of a concern to young people in conflict zones than those living in peace. The causal relationship between climate change and conflict may be an opportunity for greater communication, as is the impact of traumatic experience on mental health as a consequence of war.
Counter-intuitively, the survey showed that peace does not necessarily correlate with happiness, said Maurer. The most optimistic nations were Ukraine and Syria while the least were those removed from active conflicts. Of all those surveyed, almost half believed a third world war would be likely in their lifetime. “We’re quite good at surviving crises,” said Al-Sharif Nasser bin Nasser, Managing Director of the Middle East Scientific Institute for Security. “But not at ending them.”
The final word goes to Peter Maurer who argued that these results present a challenge not just to the ICRC but to all who are committed to creating a more secure, sustainable and just world. He said we must redouble efforts to communicate better to the millennial generation why international humanitarian laws matter; why understanding people whose ideas and experiences conflict with your own is essential for world peace; why hate speech is a significant contributor to violence. We must build on the millennial generation’s interest in solving big global challenges such as climate change and mental health, while giving them confidence that they can also prevent world conflict.
A big thank you to Peter Maurer, Tom Friedman, Rahaf Harfoush, Karolina Eklow, Micah White, Al-Sharif Nasser bin Nasser, Ilina Singh and Jorge Alejandro García Ramírez.
